This article has been inspired by the work of Andrzej Walicki. The author of The Slavophile controversy: History of a conservative utopia in the nineteenth‑century Russian thought (1975) explored several worldviews and pointed to various similarities among several thinkers. The article discusses and compares the views of Russian neo‑Slavophiles and Western traditionalists (J. Evola, R. Guénon, P. Sorokin). The author of the article brings to light the main assumptions of the conservative and traditionalist utopias: a struggle against rationalism, individualism, liberalism and capitalism.

This essay presents an intellectual profile of Roger Scruton. Its contents have been gathered from personal reminiscences of the author about their friendly encounters and discussions of books that inspired them both when Scruton was involved in the activities of the anti-communist opposition in East-Central Europe. His motives and ventures are tentatively reconstructed. He has been remembered in Poland as a conservative thinker and intellectual figure with views that are shown here against the background of his past and in the context of his efforts to understand religion with its practices, origin, the role in Western and local communities, and its bearing on the changes that have occurred European culture.

The purpose of this paper is to reconstruct Roger Scruton’s views on patriotism and the attitudes of nationalism and oikophobia that endanger proper love of homeland. According to Scruton, patriotism is identical with loyalty to the people who inhabited a certain territory and share common culture, customs and history. The feeling of national loyalty so understood is peaceful by its nature and stabilizes the democratic system. Besides patriotism, Scruton distinguishes two attitudes, of worship of one’s nation and of hostility towards it. The first attitude may transform into nationalism, and then deifies nation and leads to wars and conflicts in history. Unlike the former, the attitude of hostility towards own nation (oikophobia) justifies development of transnational institutions that limited sovereignty of the democratic nation-states and – indirectly – undermine the sovereignty of one’s people. In the final part of the paper I paraphrase the concepts of nation presupposed in the attitudes of patriotism, nationalism and oikophobia, as they are discussed in the theoretical apparatus used by Leszek Nowak in his deformative conception of culture.

In the article I present a concise view of the conservative image of the world, inspired by the works of Roger Scruton. His vision starts as a moral and political project, but then goes on to turn into a theory of culture, education and aesthetic experience. Although the project was originally intended as devoid of any religious justification, it is possible to see religion as a complement or an equivalent to the conservative attitude, as it is expressed in private life. Religious language can be understood as a useful, personal, symbolic expression of the conservative attitude to life. Scruton also undertook to defend the humane face of philosophy, by which I mean his conviction that philosophy should resist reductive tendencies of natural science, and instead should strive to develop better understanding of the essential works of art and literature known in the Western canon.

The normative system of Bogusław Wolniewicz (1927–2017) can be subsumed under three categories: (1) pessimism (fatalism, or ‘tychism’ in Wolniewicz’s terms), (2) moral determinism (‘non-meliorism’), (3) conservatism (‘right-hand orientation’). Ad (1) Wolniewicz was pessimistic in two ways: he believed human life to be tragic (fatalism) and was also convinced that most people are guided by bad instincts (dualism). Ad (2) Wolniewicz believed that moral character was biologically determined and immutable. But his strong position on this subject ignores the classical view of Aristotle or the Stoics for whom moral character (or conscience) was acquired by habit and shaped deliberately. Ad (3) I suggest that a good historical example of conservative tendency was Critias of Athens. His famous fragment of the Sisyphus contains the idea of a supremacy of laws over human passions, and reduces religion to a supportive role with respect to ethics and politics. Wolniewicz’s dualism of right-hand and left-hand orientation encourages me to distinguish between a right-wing and a left-wing perception of value. For a leftist, value is intensity of a chosen feature (progressive value), whereas for a rightist, value is an area of freedom between inacceptable extremities (modular value). On these premises I propose a simple model of axiological conflict between left-wing and right-wing citizens.

Celem artykułu jest przedstawienie rezultatów badań z zakresu historii idei zarówno europejskiego republikanizmu, jak i radykalizmu politycznego. Punktem wyjścia podjętych analiz jest rekonstrukcja interpretacji historycznego sensu sarmackiego republikanizmu szlacheckiego wypracowanej przez jednego z głównych przedstawicieli Warszawskiej Szkoły Historii Idei – Andrzeja Walickiego. W nawiązaniu do tej interpretacji, argumentacja przedstawiona w artykule kieruje się przeciwko szeroko akceptowanej tezie o jednoznacznym konserwatyzmie tej formy republikanizmu. Drogą argumentacji jest wskazanie na wewnętrzną paradoksalność opisywanego zjawiska intelektualnego, będącego z perspektywy historii idei anty-absolutystyczną, obywatelską ideologią wolności politycznej. Tym, co stanowi w artykule przedmiot krytyki, jest podjęta przez Walickiego próba interpretacji republikanizmu szlacheckie-go jako „zalążkowej” postaci nowoczesnego nacjonalizmu obywatelskiego. Argumentem przeciwko tej interpretacji jest stwierdzenie, iż jest ona oparta na normatywnym, a nie tylko opisowym podejściu do idei nowoczesności oraz ukrytej tezie na temat wewnętrznej logiki historii. W myśl głównej tezy artykułu, właściwszą drogą rozwiązania paradoksu związanego z interpretacją sarmackiego republikanizmu szlacheckiego jako „konserwatyzmu wolności” jest wpisanie tego zjawiska w euro-pejską tradycję radykalizmu politycznego. Oryginalność przedstawionych tu badań z zakresu historii radykalizmu polega na wypracowaniu w ich ramach uogólnionego pojęcia „radykalizmu stanowego”. Celem tej konstrukcji pojęciowej jest umożliwienie zidentyfikowania idei samej nowoczesności jako integralnego elementu ideologii radykalizmu trzeciego stanu względnie radykalizmu klasy średniej. Zgodnie z przed-stawioną w artykule interpretacją, sarmacki republikanizm szlachecki należałoby z kolei zidentyfikować tak samo, jak francuski „frondyzm” – jako swoisty radykalizm szlachecki, w którym można widzieć pewną sekularną religię polityczną.

The text discusses Roger Scruton’s most important philosophical views. Scruton was a conservative whose world view was firmly grounded in the Anglo-Saxon philo-sophical tradition. At the same time, he was a man of versatile interests (aesthetics, music, architecture, ecology), which was reflected in his rich creativity. He was a critic of all leftist and liberal ideologies, so he rejected both the liberal meaning of freedom and socialist meaning of equality. He understood freedom as an element of social bonds and hierarchical order. His philosophy revolves around such categories as property, natural justice, common law and oikophilia, on which he bases his ecological project („green philosophy”). Scruton’s texts also contain elements of conservative political practice.

Roger Scruton repudiates the idea that civil liberty is a natural and unconditionally desirable state of citizenry, while subjection is something degrading and unnatural. He characterizes the conservative political system as a ‘rule by institutions’ supported by a theory of nature and a theory describing the functioning of institutions. National politics results from operations of social and political institutions which have grown out of traditional arrangements, respect raison d’État, and are governed by offices. The author argues that this is a sound interpretation of essential political arrangements, if it can solve the problem of political reconstruction after a period of decline or disintegration. As a matter of fact Scruton offers such a solution in his analysis of various forms of liberalism, one of which he seems to identify with conservatism.